Information asymmetry is the fastest shortcut to starting from scratch. The more asymmetric it is, the more money it brings.

In ancient times, the news was not smooth, and business travelers could earn huge wealth by buying in place A and selling in place B. This is because the information of "what is scarce" is the key to the price difference. Once mastered, it stands at the upstream of the value chain.

As far as I can see, many senior migrant workers can only work at the bottom because they don't have principal at first, but once they get to the top and master a lot of information resources, they will almost switch from doing business to being information brokers, calling for rain and making money by making deals in the industry.

This kind of matchmaking transaction only needs matchmaking, and even the principal is not needed. As long as you make a single order, you can rest for the rest of the year. This kind of money is much more cost-effective than doing it yourself and being an old ox.

People who monopolize information exchange nodes often have the greatest bargaining power in the system. They can make money by making rules of the game without doing anything by themselves.

Small leader of an asset management company around me, team 10 people. In 2065,438+05, the project was divided into 654.38+00 million, of which he took 8.5 million, leaving 654.38+05 million for nine people. All the work is done by his people, and he is very relaxed. Because those people under him are in the downstream of the information chain, there is soup but no meat.

Do you have a lower example? There are also real estate agents who are often laughed at by white-collar workers.

Although for more than a decade, agents wearing cheap suits have been regarded as the same as washing, cutting and blowing, this wave of real estate transactions has really made the industry rich, and many diaosi counterattacks have succeeded.

It is said that there is a very ordinary downtown house in the north, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, not a10 million jump. The agency fee is 2% to 200,000 yuan. As long as you make a few orders a year, the cost performance far exceeds that of white-collar workers who work overtime until late at night every day.

In contrast, the legal review of a new three-board company before going to the board now only needs/kloc-0.5 million yuan, and the lawyer has to bear the responsibility of legal advice after receiving the money. The real estate agent has no responsibility at all. They don't need a diploma, and they don't do much. Hundreds of thousands of intermediary fees can easily enrich themselves.

Selling information is easier to make money than selling time. In addition to commercial brokers, there are also power brokers, which is even more unprofitable.

The most cost-effective way is to make money by selling other people's attention.

The business model of the so-called attention economy can be summarized by a long-standing joke: "As long as everyone in China gives me a dollar, I will become a billionaire".

This sentence was about 20 years ago. I wonder how many American investors were fooled during the first Internet bubble in the late 1990s. It turned out that most of it was nonsense.

Now that 20 years have passed, technology allows people in a remote small county to pay people in an office building in Shanghai within one second. This big lie that has been cheated for 20 years has finally come true.

The scale of attention economy is actually easy to calculate. Suppose a person has eight hours of leisure time besides working eight hours a day, sleeping eight hours a day, then attention business is robbing these eight hours.

And the cost that a person is willing to pay for his leisure time is fixed, so a simple calculation can calculate how much the average attention stay time per minute is worth, and then multiply it by the number of attention, and online celebrities such as papi sauce can start pricing sales.

The so-called diaosi person wins the world, which is vividly reflected in the business of selling concern. A computer, a network cable, millions a year, no profit, playing is the cluster effect, diaosi economy. The status quo of these new economies sometimes makes many traditional people who study and work hard according to the rules unbalanced.

For example, webcasting, I know that on the platform of Momo Live, a beautiful girl with good looks, monthly income100000 is not a problem. What is the basis?

There are enough male diaosi, and the male diaosi mobile phone has payment function. It is enough to satisfy these two points.

The first condition has always existed before, and the second condition has only been achieved in recent years, so for these girls, this magical era that they never dared to think about before has come.

The most uneconomical thing is to make money by selling your time.

Most people, with no principal, no connections and no free time, can only earn a little money by selling their time, commonly known as making a living.

I am a professional myself, so I understand the confusion of those who sell time.

Ordinary people go to the hospital with a cold, and the medical expenses are tens of dollars. Must have a bachelor's degree or above, obtain a doctor's qualification and practice 1-3 years. Only qualified doctors can make bills. And ordinary people buy a house for a lifetime with 90% income, and a group of washing, cutting and blowing agents are operating and then collecting hundreds of thousands out of thin air.

Ordinary girls study hard since childhood, and Dai Yue wears stars after work. Overtime is just a matter of tens of thousands of cervical vertebrae. Live broadcast of online celebrities, coquetry and singing a song account for millions a year.

Think about it this way, it's really hard for people who follow the rules all their lives.

Selling time is the most difficult to make money, because there are billions of homogeneous competitors, and people who sell time have almost no bargaining power in the face of buyers and can only be slaughtered at the bottom of the food chain.

Among them, smarter people can improve their labor efficiency and earn more by forcing themselves to study, study and get promoted. Most people whose intelligence cannot support the improvement of labor efficiency can only increase their income by increasing the length of working hours.

Chongqing xiaomian couples who get up at 3 am to set up stalls are not qualitatively different from the elites who work overtime until dawn-their income is linked to their working hours.

In order to jump out of the quagmire of selling time, the key is to reduce the marginal cost of labor, or to find areas that can reduce the marginal cost of labor.

Some people have discussed why the top hedge funds earn an order of magnitude more wealth than the top investment banking business, and I am afraid it is precisely because of this-the increase of fund management scale 10 times means the increase of income 10 times, and the working hours are not linearly increased 10 times, which may only cost twice as much, or even be similar to the original. If the income has increased by 10 times and the workload has also increased by 10 times, we can only continue to rely on the selling time.

People only have 24 hours a day, which means there is a production limit to making money by selling time. This is the key to why selling time can't make a lot of money.

The simplest one is Qian Shengqian.

Real estate appreciation, rent, interest, equity income, etc. It's all in Qian Shengqian.

With an annual salary of several hundred thousand, it is better to relocate in different places.

For ordinary people, in this era, the main carrier of personal wealth growth is only property appreciation. Nothing is like buying a house, which is the social common sense of China in recent ten years. But many people don't think deeply? Why is there nothing better than buying a house?

The answer is that we have entered an era when the growth rate of return on capital is higher than that of return on labor.

An important sign of class solidification is that the rate of return on capital begins to be higher than the rate of return on labor: as long as the house price rises slightly, the income that ordinary white-collar workers have worked hard for several years will be wiped out in an instant, and no matter how much they earn, they can't keep up with the speed of asset appreciation.

You see those elite investment banks, a bunch of sellers aiming to jump to the buyer, which also reflects the difference between labor return and capital return.

At present, only a few industries (such as the Internet) have higher labor return rate than capital return rate, so this can actually be used as a yardstick to judge whether an industry is a sunrise industry.

Hong Kong people call buying a house "getting on the bus", and the first property bought by the working class is called "getting on the bus". In fact, it is particularly vivid-imagine a group of people running after the car. As long as you can jump on the bus, you can sit and lie down in the car, which is faster than the people chasing and running outside.

This is the magic of Qian Shengqian.

When Qian Shengqian is combined with the information monopoly mentioned above, it is even more powerful. Someone contracted a temple outside a scenic spot in China and made a slight renovation. With a net income of 4 million a year, just lie down and count the money.

Five principles of making money in China.

1, political acumen

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, self-employed speculators were the first creators of wholesale wealth, who were often excluded from the mainstream state-owned economy and forced to start businesses.

In the middle and late 1980s, people who made a fortune returned to the system from the outside. Relying on the village or collective society, using their prestige or position in the original social system (village head, branch secretary), people who raise funds to run processing factories become the second group of rich people. This wave of opportunities is inextricably linked with the system transformation, and the southern Jiangsu model (Huaxi Village) is the most typical one.

The price dual-track system reform in the early 1990s and the national advancement and civil retreat in the late 1990s. I don't know how many people took advantage of the opportunity to sell state-owned capital and seized the opportunity to buy and sell property rights cheaply. From 2000 to 2005. China's accession to the WTO has brought historic opportunities to the export processing industry. Freight forwarders and textile exports have enriched a large number of uneducated small coastal bosses. Open a mine casually in 2005, and the commodity bull market has made more money in your sack.

As for the reform of commercial housing, the reform of non-tradable shares and the development of the capital market, they are all closely related to the wealth of each family. It used to be said that watching news broadcast to get rich was actually reasonable.

There have been no fewer than ten great opportunities to get rich in China in the past 20 years, and almost all of them are closely related to the changes in the political structure. Its basic feature is wave flow. A wave of three to five years will make you full, but it is almost impossible to continue earning after this wave. Coal mining, import and export processing, this is only a few years, and now it is struggling to survive.

Step 2 start from scratch

In China, to predict the future direction of society, one of the simplest and most basic ideas is:

"China is following the old path of the United States".

This is the basis of the so-called CTC ("CC China"). It can be said that it is a main development line of all emerging industries in China in the last 20 years. The clarity and coherence of this main line is in sharp contrast to the fleeting wave of political trends mentioned above. From the beginning of the first Internet bubble in China in the late 1990s to the beginning of 2000, until the second Internet bubble in the last three years, almost all successful emerging enterprises with a volume of more than10 billion US dollars, the initial prototype of their products is a "China version of American XX".

Solving scarcity is the fundamental purpose of all businesses. The fundamental meaning of making money is "solving problems for others", and the so-called profit is nothing more than the return of solving a problem for others (society). Moreover, starting from scratch, from 0 to 1, is far more worthwhile to meet the scarcity demand than from 1 to 10.

From an economic point of view, the scarcest things are the most valuable, so the returns are different. BAT, these giants who started as porters, solved the situation from scratch. After that, the followers have long been lost in the pattern and can only eat leftovers.

3. Roy thinking

If we explain this financially, it is ROE (return on net assets) = profit rate * turnover rate * financial leverage ratio.

Note that these three are multipliers, so your failure will be amplified by this amplifier when the profit is negative. But even so, almost no one who has made a lot of money does not use leverage. Dare to bet is part of entrepreneurship.

As I said in my previous answer, the poor dare to do great things only because they have many resources, and the first thing that the rich think of is how to raise resources. The premise of skillfully using financial leverage is to dare to move the consciousness of "not your own" resources, or to put it more bluntly, to dare to borrow other people's resources for my use.

Buffett's yield after deducting leverage is only about 13%. Limited by their own limited resources, it shows that they can't control the flow of resources and are still just slaves of resources.

Let's talk about the turnover rate. Even if the profit is low, as long as there is a high turnover rate, it can develop in a short time. For example, many people queue up to buy green tea, and grandma's house, the price of vegetables is cheap but the turnover rate is high. In the case of little profit, increasing turnover rate can still improve ROE.

Which makes money, selling jewelry or selling mutton kebabs? It's hard to say. The profit of jewelry items may be higher, but the turnover rate is too low. On the contrary, mutton skewers have a low profit rate, but the turnover rate is much higher. Assuming that the same funds are invested in selling jewelry and mutton kebabs, assuming that jewelry is paid back once every three months (from production to logistics to sales) and mutton kebabs are paid back once a day (from production to sales), then under the assumption that both can be sold, maybe selling mutton kebabs is more profitable than selling jewelry.

In addition, intermediate industries and intelligence industries are usually expected to achieve higher return on equity, mainly because of lighter assets.

4. Know yourself

Yes, studying yourself is more important than studying others and money. Our biggest problem is that we know far less about ourselves than we think.

Just because you can make money doesn't mean you can enjoy it from money. The attitude towards money is actually a particularly personal thing. Most people may be able to measure the time value of various resources correctly, but they often don't care about their time cost and don't know their income preferences.

This ability needs to be based on a deep understanding of one's body and mind; The same funds and time, due to the difference of information, need to explore and practice for themselves repeatedly, where is the most worthwhile and where is the most effective for the present and the future. The poor often regard "money" as too "valuable" and regard resources other than "money", such as their own time, as too worthless.

Many people like to confuse making money, managing money and investing. In fact, these are three completely different things, and the skill tree that needs to be lit is different. As far as my observation is concerned, people who can make money may not necessarily manage money; Wealth management and investment are two completely different things. If you let a person who can invest do his own business, he is likely to lose a lot. You need to explore what you are best suited to do.

Many people have all kinds of unrealistic fantasies about starting a business. Obviously, they are not self-disciplined enough and hate burdensome people. They want to be a production enterprise, but they don't know that this can be regarded as the most complicated business model. From raw material supply, procurement, production, inventory, logistics and sales, every link can't go wrong, and the gross profit margin is low. They must drill through every detail to deduct the cost. It can be said that it was a mistake. If you don't know yourself, the cost of your life is irreparable.

5. Anti-fraud awareness

The "liar" here is in a broad sense, referring to all people who try to extract resources from you for zero-sum motives. The cultivation of anti-fraud consciousness should run through life.

Investment itself, first of all, must be an anti-common sense thing, otherwise the rich will not be a minority in the population ratio. For investment, it is much more zero-sum than making money, so sometimes it is necessary not only to look at the trend, but also to assess whether people around you have seen it, and more importantly, to consider whether people around you know them.

If making money is still between people and foreign things, then investment must be a game between people, which is more complicated and bizarre. We should not only guard against scammers on the road and in short messages, but also guard against scammers in the capital market, scammers disguised as "entrepreneurs", scammers disguised as "good companies", scammers disguised as "partners" and "good friends" and scammers disguised as "lovers".

How to read financial reports, how to judge the authenticity of information and how to check the integrity level of a business partner; The importance of these things can be said that minutes can cost you half your life's hard work. But unfortunately, these things are rarely studied locally by children, and they can only pay for them themselves.

When we were young, the education and family education provided by the school were blank about how to deal with money. Most parents and teachers in China don't understand these things themselves. Since I have never understood it in my life, let alone preach to the next generation. The resulting social gap will only widen further.

This is the real secret of making millions a year. As the landlord in "1942" said to the long-term workers on the way to exile, "I know how to change from a poor man to a rich man. Give me ten years, and I will still be the master. "